


This is the light of the mind (cold and planetary)

by externalinitialdampners



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Multi, and the whole big bad universe thing kind of covers a lot more ground, in which Silas university has adapted to the changing times, set in the very distant future
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-29
Updated: 2015-07-19
Packaged: 2018-03-09 14:47:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3253670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/externalinitialdampners/pseuds/externalinitialdampners
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>space au in which aggressively righteous laura hollis has never left her home planet before she's plonked onto the surface of Styria, hauling the cute, brownie-scoffing LaFontaine and Lola Perry in her wake. And as though the vastly increased statistical likelihood of clumsiness having exponentially increased thanks to a subtly different gravitational pull on this creepy planet wasn't enough cause for concern, Laura is pretty certain that her broody, dark-haired roommate considers it her sole purpose to make her life as difficult as possible, and is incidentally somehow mixed up in the bizarre and unexplained disappearances of girls on campus. In which Danny Lawrence is tall and gorgeous and makes Laura question her journalistic integrity sometimes because she wants to equip some serious hyperbole in describing this girl. In which Laura has no idea whatsoever why Carmilla keeps shooting those seduction eyes at her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Maybe I'll go where I can see stars

“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”  
~ Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

////

Laura Hollis shifts nervously under the weight of a dozen cursory glances as she stumbles into the spaceport lounge, a battered backpack slung over one shoulder, hair pulled into a messy bun. Haphazardly decked out in synthetic jeans and an old t-shirt, she feels conspicuously underdressed amongst the starched and recently-washed apparel of the assemblage of youths who are apparently her peers, or rivals, and it dawns on her, as the arid expanse of a packed, glass domed room stretches threateningly before her tiny, coffee-fuelled, morbidly unprepared form, that she really has no idea how she ended up here. 

Her father had made it sound so simple, because any decent journalist needs zero-gravity experience and at least a basic understanding of the mathematics that allows ships to jump through centuries of space without so much as a dent in the hull, and, yes, the Silas Intergalactic Academy for Spacefaring Arts is literally the best place in the universe to learn those things, but all the same, Laura likes gravity, and the irascible shores of her home. 

“Cheer up, shortstack,” Lafontaine appears at Laura’s elbow, their face stretched in the most manically enthused grin Laura has ever seen, “We’re six and a half hours away from escaping this slightly poisonous atmosphere.”

They grasp Laura’s elbow and pull her out of the way of an incoming party of raucous trainee fighter pilots, one of whom throws her a revoltingly suggestive look as he saunters past. Laura turns to her companion and pouts, “Well, maybe if I weren’t completely unprepared,” she gestures to her single (hastily stuffed with various items of clothing and a really old copy of Dracula) backpack and ruthlessly tangled hair, “Because someone forgot to mention that they’d decided to bring us all in a week early until, oh, two hours before boarding, after which point our entire education would be sunk as far below water as New York City.”

LaFontaine grimaces, “Okay, so maybe this isn’t my finest hour, but we’re here, aren’t we?” They smile and gaze around at the tightly packed throng, among which Laura can make out several decidedly alien shapes, and she can’t help but join them, albeit with extreme reluctance because she’s still completely angry and determined to let it play out without surrendering to-

She catches them shooting her puppy dog eyes and sighs, “Alright fine, but you are so helping me steal underwear when we get there. My Dad only gave me enough credits for, like, three cookies with the economy on Styria.” 

Before LaFontaine can start to gush about intergalactic commerce, Laura grasps their shoulders and turns them around in time to see Lola Perry, looking incredibly flustered, rush through the crowd. With more than a little satisfaction, Laura reminds herself that she can’t possibly berate LaFontaine as much as their clearly frantic girlfriend, who has just spotted them from across the room. 

Unwilling to witness this slightly furious, but mostly soppy, reunion, Laura sidles away, dropping her backpack down beside a surprisingly vacant bench and collapsing onto its fiercely uncomfortable surface. 

She puts her head in her hands and groans, nursing several small injuries from the alarming number of times she’d tripped racing through the subway station to catch an early morning train to the cosmodrome. Compared to her, even the hydrochloric-acid-scarred LaFontaine seems graceful, and running on half a cup of coffee and more than a few late-night drinks from a seriously ill-advised night out, Laura had been even less co-ordinated than usual.

Which doesn’t bode well for what promises to be several intensive months of navigating the intricacies of alien etiquette on a world that probably has some subtle gravitational difference that will upset all of the equilibrium-preserving practice she’s gotten in her nineteen years. 

“Hey, mind if I join you?” Laura jolts upright at the sound of a distinctly gravelly voice in alarming proximity to her supposedly private sulk. An extremely tall, red-headed girl towers over her, practically blotting out the sun, which Laura is thankful for because her head is starting to remind her of how little sleep she’s gotten.  
“Oh, uh, sure,” Laura stutters, shifting sideways unnecessarily and gesturing to the wealth of empty space at her side. 

The red-head grins and takes a seat, sticking out her hand immediately, “I noticed that you looked kind of…”

“Dead?” Laura suggests, with a slight, chagrined smile. 

And, yeah, her laugh is kind of cute, “Pretty much, yeah, and I thought that being, um, dead is really no way to start off your university experience, so, here I am. I’m Danny, by the way, Danny Lawrence.”

Laura can’t help the small blush that accompanies Danny’s, admittedly adorable, introduction. She grasps Danny’s hand, feeling formidable strength in the much taller girl’s grip, “Laura Hollis,” she’s not exactly sure why her name sounds so strange rolling off her tongue, but the animated girl at her side is making her feel all kinds of out of her comfort zone. She isn’t entirely certain that the strange fluttering in her stomach has to do with the boundlessly bright smile Danny turns her head just a little to hide, and not the woeful condition of her diet after five years of regimented mealtimes in the most secure boarding school on this planet, but she’s willing to entertain the thought that the cute girl sitting next to her isn’t just being charitable. 

Which is pretty amazing, really, because she hasn’t even brushed her hair, and Danny’s is really pretty in this light, which doesn’t feel quite as sickening anymore. It felt embarrassingly nice, actually. 

(she’d resolved not to trip face-first into another crush this year, but the way Danny’s eyes crinkle when she catches Laura staring at her really abjectly makes that seem just a little bit more impossible than she’d equated)

////

Perry is, like, all kinds of on their case as soon as she catches up to them, wrapping warm arms around LaFontaine at a velocity sufficient to make them rock back on their heels. “Whoa there,” they caution, their voice muffled by Perry’s ludicrously bright sweater, “I know that it was incredibly irresponsible of me to neglect to check any of my messages for three days but in my defence I am this close,” they illustrate their proximity to enlightenment with a gesture that makes Perry (tragically) pull away, turning her head to expose an unfairly beautiful profile, “to – ah- to a breakthrough.”

(they definitely just tripped over their words because that is some kind of unfair geometry)

Perry turns back to give them a mildly infuriated smile, still not relinquishing her grip on their bicep, which is getting a little numb at this point because they might have accidentally fallen down a flight of stairs whilst transporting corrosive acid from their lab to the kitchen for… reasons. But they don’t mention the bruises cluttering their arm because Perry is touching them and she should never stop. 

They can’t help but lean in really close, so close they can feel Perry’s smile against their neck, and whisper, in the most horrifically lewd way possible, “We are going into space.” And then Perry is laughing and dropping her hands down to her sides, because they’ve both been dreaming of this for years, getting out from under all this history. 

With aching slowness, Perry presses a kiss to their lips, and she tastes of the freshly baked brownies she probably woke up at some hellish hour to make, and the world erupts into stars because the void of space suddenly doesn’t feel so empty if Perry is with them.

///

Mother takes her sweet time pacing slowly around Carmilla, evaluating her with cold sobriety, from her scuffed boots to her tied-off t-shirt, drooping a little on her shoulders to reveal just a bit more of Carmilla’s neck than she ever feels comfortable letting her Mother see. It’s a really old t-shirt from some long-forgotten love affair and she’s not sure why she’s wearing it but she feels the 21st century really keenly because everything is so big now, and she misses humanity when it was just dipping a toe into the pond. And maybe she misses being able to see the stars at night. 

But she’d never admit that, so she keeps her jaw rigid and her every impatient twitch as nonchalant as possible, because Mother doesn’t need to know that. And Mother already knows everything. 

She wonders if there’s enough open space out there to bury her again. The thought makes her chest feel heavy, and kind of like it might cave in. “You remain fully aware of what it is we’re doing here,” her Mother says, with just the slightest hint of threat in her tone. “Sweetheart,” she adds, and Carmilla knows it’s an afterthought because she is an afterthought. She has always been here. Or at least it feels like that. 

Mother doesn’t phrase it like a question because they both know it isn’t. It’s a reminder. The universe may have gotten bigger but Carmilla feels smaller than ever as she replies, more boldly than she has felt in a long time, “Yeah, I’m not an idiot.” And she really just wants to get out there, into the cold expanse stretching endlessly around them, and forget for one second that she is monstrous and old and still doing these things. 

Still kidnapping girls, flirting with them, teasing them, kissing them, watching them lose their minds. 

She wants to eclipse into something brighter, softer, more worthy of all this stolen time. Mother narrows her eyes, offended by Carmilla’s abrasive tone, but no more than usual, so Carmilla just shuts her eyes and lets her body soar, briefly, as Mother’s displeasure translates into kinetic energy. Her head slams into something solid and her teeth snap together and everything hurts for just a moment before she slumps forward, comically unbruised. Carmilla lets a small, pained sound escape her lips and regrets it instantly, because she can feel Mother’s smugness as she stands above the small, tensed form of her awful creation.

Mother reaches down and takes Carmilla’s jaw in one hand, jerking her face upwards, “I don’t really have to remind you of the importance of what we do here, do I?”

(all those dead girls)

Carmilla swears she can see coffin lids reflected in Mother’s eyes and she’s clenched her fingers really tightly but Carmilla manages to spit out a “yes” between her teeth. Mother lets go and she slumps again, waiting a moment before she attempts to regain her footing. She expects to find those dark eyes staring cold shivers into her skin, but Mother is already walking away, leisurely, as though she can’t move faster, much faster, than Carmilla has ever really appreciated. Because the fact is she hasn’t needed to in a long time, not since Carmilla was freshly dead and anguished and terrified. 

She’s still terrified, but she doesn’t run anymore. There’s no way for her to fight and nothing to fight with.

////

Laura finds herself talking, really taking, with Danny, for what seems like minutes but is probably much longer because suddenly Perry is rushing towards her, LaFontaine in tow, and babbling about boarding times and avoiding window seats at all costs. Danny ducks her head in something like embarrassment as Laura casts what is probably a pitifully disappointed glance in her direction.

LaFontaine flashes a grin at Laura and cuts across Perry’s rambling with smoothness only they can manage, “Or you could sit with…”

“Danny,” Laura’s red-headed (companion?) blurts.

“If you want to?” Laura says quickly. She doesn’t want to impose on what might still be a simple gesture of charity, but Danny actually lights up at the suggestion and immediately begins to heft Laura’s backpack onto her shoulder. “You don’t have to do that,” Laura finds herself protesting, but Danny just smiles and gestures at her full, and admittedly unimpressive, profile. 

“No offense, but you look kind of exhausted and, well, tiny,” and then Danny is blushing and Laura struggles to hide the sloppy smile that tries to sidle onto her lips. “Not,” Danny hastens to add, “That I’m trying to demean you or reduce you to your physical attributes because the Summer Soc has actual rules against doing things like that because they are always unhelpful and girls should build up other girls not tear them down, especially not in the name of chivalry or whatever. I just, uh, wanted to be considerate.” Laura finds herself staring with barely contained reverence at this thoughtful and decidedly bashful girl, and she might be famous for babbling but this is just epic. 

Laura giggles and Danny jerks her head up, eyes widened, “What’s the Summer Soc?”

Immediately, Danny stands a little straighter, as though she’s about to start bellowing the galactic anthem or something, “It’s an all-girls athletics club that operates on Silas. We organise the annual Adonis festival and hunt, which is really just an excuse for girls to play fast and loose with blaster regulations chasing holograms, but it’s pretty fun. We do other things too, like educate girls on the history of feminism, which began on Earth,” and she winces like she’s berating herself because of course Laura knows, and she does, but Laura just reaches out her hand and slips it comfortably into Danny’s grip.

The taller girl actually chokes on her words a little, “Wh-which you know, obviously, but you’d be amazed how many people take all of this for granted and it helps to inform people of where it all began because so many alien civilisations are just medieval about equivalent rights for genders within their species, and some are actually better, amazingly, so yeah,” Danny wraps her fingers around Laura’s and her heart palpitates a little, which she chooses to ignore. 

LaFontaine clears their throat loudly and Laura jolts out of her momentary (which might be temporally inaccurate, but she’s choosing to ignore that) lapse in rational thought and tries to pretend that she isn’t, somehow, holding hands with a girl she just met. Perry starts to drag LaFontaine towards the dwindling pool of students still waiting to board the spacecraft which, Laura gathers from a brief glimpse through the acid rain-streaked windows, is absolutely massive. They throw a languid salute in Laura’s direction as Perry’s irresistible gravity yanks them away, and Laura and Danny exchange a brief look before trailing after them.

(and Laura pretends not to notice that Danny hasn’t let go of her hand yet)

///

Carmilla is late, naturally, swanning in, resplendently nonchalant, just as the last frantic trickle of barely post-pubescent teenager disappears into the docking bay proper. She takes her sweet time crossing the vast expanse of the empty lounge, littered with discarded cups and half-eaten breakfast muffins, her tremendously heavy kit bag slung over one shoulder. 

Carmilla catches a flash of impatience in the wearied eyes of the woman stood primly behind the check-in desk, but she quickly schools her expression when she notes Carmilla’s distinctive dark hair swaying, uncombed, a few inches below her shoulders. She proffers her boarding card mutely, and it is given a cursory once over because there are very few ambitious people in this cosmodrome who haven’t been told, in hushed tones, to lay off on the snark around the Dean of Silas’ daughter.

In a display of uncharacteristic charity, Carmilla flashes a smile as she waltzes past the check-in counter, garnering such a look of bewilderment from its recipient that she almost regrets it. Almost. 

More than anything, after several long hours of a flight across the planet, she wants to stretch her muscles, morph into a more sympathetic form and curl up somewhere for several hours. Alas, she can already hear the combined giggling of the most recent batch of Silas Academy applicants, no doubt boasting a premium selection of optimally aged girls for Carmilla to stalk.

(the thought makes her skin crawl, as though it’s sluiced mercilessly in blood once again)

The long corridor between the lounge and the docking bay echoes the sounds of activity ahead oddly, as though the tunnel is choked with a thousand disembodied snatches of inane chatter. It’s been more than a few years since she’s taken this particular route to Silas, because generally she’s gallivanting on some alien world absorbing culture with endless enthusiasm, but Mother had ordered her to this backwater planet several years ago. Apparently there’s some strange dormant energy here, which Carmilla has yet to actually sense, but she’s not about to throw shade on her Mother’s increasingly paranoid intergalactic search for the stars know what. 

Carmilla tries not to give two fucks, but there is definitely something strange about this planet and it’s triplet moons hovering overhead, making waves lash the fortified shores of its diversely vegetated surface, mostly unspoiled by its inhabitants, which is unusual considering the enduring carelessness of humankind. Whoever colonised this world evidently put some serious safeguards in place, because the clamour for industrial land has been met with stony silence. It’s as though they’re trying to protect something, or hide something. (Not that she cares).

And she really doesn’t, she reminds herself, as she finally takes her leave of the creepy acoustic individuality of the departure tunnel, and steps into a massive hangar packed with wayward students dumping backpacks and cases onto waiting conveyor belts. Security seems lax, but Carmilla knows for a fact that nothing even mildly explosive makes it into the grounds of the cosmodrome, unless you count reserve fuel in case the clean drives of any ship break down mid-voyage. Students are flooding into the waiting ship, in all it’s modern, streamlined glory. 

Carmilla remembers the first interstellar voyage she was on, and is stuck forcibly with that familiar sense of confinement that never fails to unnerve her. When Mother had coaxed her ‘rightful master’ away from the rapidly decaying cess pit that planet Earth had, inevitably, become, space travel had already been handed over to hungry corporations, but Carmilla left as quickly as she could, spending almost a decade wandering around Mars in a thin atmospheric suit to protect her from the sun, so much hotter in the red wastes of that beautiful, alien planet. Suffice it to say that galactic travel was a lot less glamourous in those days. 

She returned home, of course, to drag several girls down into the jaws of her Mother’s insane ritual, and she was shocked to see begrudging surprise on Mother’s face when she appeared without explanation on the grounds of Silas University. Some part of her wonders what would have transpired if she never went back, if she set out into the stars and hoped that her ship wouldn’t fall apart before she found somewhere remote and cold and quiet to build something resembling a peaceful existence. 

Snap out of it, Karnstein, she snarled at herself, as she flung her burden among the brightly coloured accoutrements of her fellow students, all of them glancing nervous up at the domineering, polished face of what must seem to them something indomitably huge. They hadn’t seen the monstrous ships that alien armies had flaunted in front of them as peace talks commenced and dissolved and resumed, battered and scarred, until an unlikely truce had been formed. Carmilla barely remembers that war. It was a lot of blood and charred flesh and the sudden nothingness that hits you when you get sucked, along with the atmosphere of your small craft, into space. 

They had likely seen little more than the expanse of their tiny world, and it seems somehow sad that planets have suddenly become so infinitesimal. There was a time when everything that Carmilla knew was the Earth, a time when she’d almost asphyxiated (a real feat) as Mars came into view. But that world, that zeal, is a long way away now, systems of thriving coexistence away from her. 

(she needs to start pretending that the years have made her feel stronger)


	2. This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

“waking alone/at the hour when we are/trembling with tenderness/lips that would kiss/form prayers to broken stone” – The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot

///

Laura is bouncing in her seat like a four year old, bobbing her head along to some imaginary beat as her attention snaps from the gleaming interior of this very real, very much about to take off, spaceship to the massive hangar outside, glistening with walkways. Danny has one of her hands trapped against an armrest but the other taps an incessant pattern against her thigh, and it isn’t something she likes to admit to herself, but Danny is a little bit smitten, and she’s known this girl for about two hours.

But there’s just something about her, something in the way she imitates the dolorous tones of the newsreaders blaring from every screen in the vicinity as they drone on about economic inequalities throughout the galaxy and ships being found after decades lost in space, emergency jump drives compromised or fried in solar storms, something in the way she completely devoured the cookie that Danny bought her on the way to their seats (Danny doesn’t mention the covert negotiations it took to get herself seated beside Laura), or perhaps it’s the fact that she’s tapping the beat to ‘Staying Alive’ in the very late stages of a spacecraft launch.

Laura steals a glance in Danny’s direction and smiles when she catches her staring with practically no pretense. Her fingers squirm a little as she turns over her hand to trap Danny’s fingers between hers with a strangely thoughtful expression, “I know it’s mostly because I looked completely miserable,” she flashes a pouting smile at Danny and there is no mistaking the heavy flip flop of her heartbeat, “But I’m really glad I met you.”

Danny wants to say so much more but they’ve known each other for two hours and they’re about to be trapped in close proximity for an alarming number of light years, so all she says is, “Me too.”

///

Perry traps their fingers in a strangling grip as she exchanges words good-naturedly with the students packed into the aisle opposite theirs, pretending everything is perfectly fine as she squeezes every ounce of blood from LaFontaine’s fingers. And they know they should probably be in pain or irritated but they’re mostly just in love.

  
Disgusting, really.

They’ve observed a thousand chemical reactions, some whose clash sent puffs of gas wafting around beakers, some whose violence literally let their hair on fire, much to Perry’s agitation, but something about the way she smiles through her fear makes them doubt the existence of anything more powerful than this.

Perry makes them tingle, and when she’s fixing their hair or staring into their eyes like she hasn’t memorised the shade, all they can think about is how stupidly, painfully in love they are. The universe through which their home planet whirs at a truly alarming speed is vast and, honestly, mostly empty, but Perry feels like the centre of everything.

They tear their eyes away from her animated description of the new cleaning rotas she’s devised for the entire floor to adopt (something LaFontaine considers wholly unlikely) and glance around at the bustle of terrestrial and blatantly extra-terrestrial activity as humanoids and variations thereupon shift in seats and try to find comfortable position for all of their arms with only two armrests. They swear they can hear someone chattering through several rows of serrated seats about humanoid pandering and it makes them smile just a little because they read a lot of the old books that Laura sends in dizzying waves of enthusiasm every several weeks, and the universe has come such a long way.

Laura’s voice seems to pierce the veil of chatter and, yup, she’s complaining once again about the false economy on Styria and the galactic tariffs on cocoa products and Danny, who is so clearly entranced by Laura’s existence it’s embarrassing to watch, is just nodding her head like half of Laura’s sentences are even making the slightest amount of sense. They know this is what they must sound like when Laura’s ancient human history reading list happens to include something even vaguely scientific and they just have to marvel with someone at how little people knew, how curious they were.

They’re still not really over the fact that something as unlikely as life even exists, never mind so much of it, teeming in every corner of the universe; diverse and sometimes completely incomprehensible to the human mind but still there and indomitable. “Sweetie,” Perry actually has to nudge them in order to wrench them out of the wormhole of pure excitement they’ve fallen into. When LaFontaine jolts in their seat and jars their head against the seat Perry smiles at them with heart-breaking fondness. She’s holding their hand in a gentle grip now, stroking their knuckles, placated but obviously terrified.

Then the engines come to life with a titanic heave of energy and suddenly those knuckles are being pressed together so tightly the bones crack.

“No offense, Per, but you look like you’re about to commit some sort of heinous crime,” LaFontaine quips, and it’s not really a huge exaggeration because Perry has that clench in her jaw that she gets when they burn tiny craters into her table or incinerate her sofa. That ‘I love you but I’m about to brutally murder you’ look.

“I mean, we’re really not going to go all that fast, just enough to break through the atmosphere, which, trust me, is like throwing a pebble into a pond compared to how difficult it was the first time around. Interestingly, this’ll feel a whole lot faster because, you know, acceleration and gravity and whatnot, but in a few hours we’ll be travelling faster than the speed of light and it’ll feel like we aren’t moving at all because technically we can’t be and-”

Perry’s grip relaxes slightly, even as the ship is levered into the launch pad, tipping crazily onto its side so that they’re pressed into their seats and holding their hands out, entwined, in front of them. Her eyes are squeezed shut and Laura is actually singing now, with Danny laughing along, and everyone is either talking too loudly or refusing to make a sound. There really is no in between.

“Lafontaine,” Perry says slowly, “Please keep talking.” Her voice is low and pained.

They practically trip over their words in their haste to continue, “I know the infinite depths of your disregard for the theory of faster-than-light travel, so I in light of our current circumstances I should probably tell you about the first time any human ever did this sort of thing. It might actually be comforting to realise how completely unprepared they were for their journey, but, hey, Kennedy made a promise. You know who Kennedy was, right?”

///

Carmilla is finding it increasingly difficult to read her book when this stupid planets useless gravitation pull seems intent upon forcing her to pay attention to the utter drivel being cheerfully spewed in every conceivable sort of close proximity to her. She should have opted for getting huge black hairs on everyone’s luggage in the cargo hold, but some ill-advised urge to be close to people has landed her in the deeply unfortunate position of listening to a group of disgruntled aliens complain about discriminatory seat design.

  
Apparently this is what she spent two months following ice-cold trails across an entire star system for; another friendly reminder that, no, the most recent batch of toddlers has not made significant intellectual progress, regardless of genealogy.

(things were so much simpler back when Kennedy was waging a pissing contest against Stalin)

She shifts Nietzsche into a better position above her face and broods furiously at the page for an entire two seconds before admitting bitterly to herself that she isn’t going to get any reading done in the foreseeable future. So, with a sigh, she turns to the crustaceous, humanoid alien at her side and makes a snide comment about unnecessary adaptations, purely for the sake of the ensuing heated argument. It’s been a while, she realises as she struggles to regain fluency in the throaty sounds and complex clicking sequences that constitute this particular language, since she’s really spoken properly to anyone aside from her Mother.

Even William only merits the occasional scathing remark.

It feels nice, even if she is deliberately being rude, to have a proper conversation with someone whose ancestors she is slightly less likely to have known personally. Because sometimes she meets achingly pretty girls in one of the many underground clubs dotting Syria’s treacherous surface and she’ll dance with them and maybe kiss them and suddenly she’ll be pushing them back against the wall of their dorm and with her uncanny sight she’ll see, through the silvery dark, a synthetic paperback with a name printed on the cover.

  
A name she knows. A name she screamed as a blast, silent in the emptiness of space, tore the belly of the ship open and dumped her out where she could watch human bodies do what they do when every force they depend so much upon abandons them abruptly. She watched so many friends just… rupture, their screams imaginary as their mouths gaped in something like confusion at her untouched silhouette in the light of the stars.

And suddenly kissing the daughters they left behind seems so tragic.

(she hates this she hates this she hates this)

///

Gravity presses her shuddering into her seat as the ship scrapes through the atmosphere, juddering as though they’re in the middle of a solar storm. Danny’s fingers are strangely loose around hers and Laura glances over and, yeah, she’s actually smiling, as though anything about this is enjoyable. It hadn’t really occurred to her before, but Danny is definitely a thrill-seeker, the kind of girl who races through rainforests daring the trees to wrap her around them.

Laura likes this girl.

Even though her version of living on the edge is adding sugar to hot chocolate.

LaFontaine is describing the space race in excruciating detail, their voice strained with excitement and Perry looks absolutely green, but she’s also got that little smile only LaFontaine can bring to her lips. Her chest feels like it’s going to cave in with the pressure of struggling through this atmosphere, but she feels inexplicably content, holding hands with a stranger. And hoping she won’t have to call Danny a stranger for much longer.

They breach the final agonising layer of Laura’s home and suddenly everything is light and that probably is puke floating over her head. Danny lets out a breath, grinning like a lunatic, and squeezes Laura’s hand. “We’re in space!” LaFontaine declares hysterically, and Perry starts to giggle.

“So,” Danny says breathlessly, “How would you rate your first extra-planetary experience?” Her hair has fallen into her face, frizzy with static electricity, but she looks beautiful anyway.

Laura has always had words, but she doesn’t know what to say. So she just nods and Danny seems to accept it, smiling and reaching up to push her hair back off her face in a gesture that makes Laura’s mouth dry.

Over Danny’s shoulder LaFontaine is mouthing ‘hey miss heart eyes’ at Laura with the most devious grin she’s ever seen.

///

Eventually, Carmilla spits a parting riposte and pounces out of her seat, forging with hard won mobility through the sea of floating pens and hair pins, soon to be retrieved by the ship’s ventilation system. She can feel eyes on her as she tumbles with perfectly fluency through zero-gravity motions, kicking off walls and seats, reorienting herself so that she’s standing upwards and everyone else is facing her at a ninety degree angle. It’s all a matter of tricking the mind into realising that the world is all perception, but she’s pretty adept at delusion.

She has to admit to herself that she isn’t quite recovered from her amazement that this is her reality. Her eyes were forged in her mother’s womb so many years ago and they should never have seen these things. She almost commits the blasphemy of thinking that this is a blessing.

But someone is bleeding in the room and it’s driving her insane, so she knows it’s not. She doesn’t allow herself to forget that she isn’t the hero of whatever twisted story the universe wants to weave around her.

As the pneumatic door slides shut behind her, Carmilla lets her lungs breathe again, tasting the artificial twinge in the air. It reminds her of months spent dealing cards back when travelling to another planet was still a big deal. Oxygen had always posed a problem so she’d breathed perhaps once or twice a week, and no more, throwing the ship into a state of bewilderment as its computers ran basic arithmetic again and again, failing to reconcile the numbers.

She performs a series of acrobatics to navigate the narrow passageway, careful not to push too hard and dent the shiny new walls, or accidently propel herself through them. Underestimating her strength in such situation, what with zero-gravity so hellishly unpredictable, has gotten her into more than a few sticky situations. Such as explaining why the new hole in the wall is shaped like her.

Her book is tucked into the waistband of her jeans, and she just wants to read somewhere where she doesn’t have to pretend to breathe. She’s not precisely certain of where she’s going, but probably less than one per cent of the people on this ship are capable of doing what she’s doing, so she isn’t too worried about straying out of bounds. The crew are waiting for gravity to be activated and the students are probably too busy screaming at the various bodily fluids floating around the cabin to follow her, even if they could.

  
Carmilla can’t shake the feeling that she’s left something important behind in that cramped room, and the thought almost makes her laugh because she doesn’t really have anything of value left to leave behind.

(these next few years can’t pass by quickly enough)


	3. vastness is bearable only through love

“You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.” ~ Carl Sagan

///

When artificial gravity finally brings the last floating potato chip crashing down, Lafontaine drags Perry to fetch snacks for their arduous journey through space and time, ignoring Perry’s flapping arms and ‘health and safety concerns’ as they manoeuvre through a sea of sweaty pong. Laura is left sitting with Danny as she watches the distant stars slide by in intent silence. And it’s nice, Laura muses, because she barely knows this girl but she already feels like maybe falling asleep against her shoulder. She thinks that even if she drooled or snored or muttered, Danny would still like her. 

Which is not a familiar feeling, because most people are so particular, but Danny is slumped carelessly, long limbs cramped against the seat in front of her, hair frizzy from take-off, mussed further by her attempts to tame it. She’s lackadaisical and warm and Laura doesn’t know if she wants to kiss her or go hiking with her or listen to her read classics underneath a makeshift blanket fort, but she knows that she wants to be here. 

She hadn’t been sure about any of this, with her father sending her increasingly lengthy messages, littered with typos and worry. She’d picked out her mother’s death in every syllable, livid in the lilt of survival tactics, blaster safety and the perils of zero-gravity training. But she has never been able to cure his loneliness by sticking around, and even though leaving feels selfish, she has to do it. And if the actual, authentic library on Silas, complete with actual, non-synthetic texts, hadn’t been enough to nip her heels light years away from the sun-drenched house cluttered with absence, she thinks she’s found something to follow.

Danny turns to look at Laura, her eyes heavy-lidded, her mouth curled in a small smile and Laura feels something in her surrender. Before she can say something really stupid, Danny reaches out to take her hand, her voice lazy and blissful as she enquires, “Do you know anything about those stars?” She presses Laura’s index finger against the glass (or whatever it is that keeps the total lack of anything out there from asserting itself in the cabin) and she picks out a spider-web of constellations against the interrupted dark. 

It strikes Laura, as she peers into space, that Danny still sees something beautiful in all that emptiness, when everyone just wants to take the small pockets of value scattered across the endless universe. She’s not interested in precious minerals or lost technology; she’s as enamoured with the shape of the night sky as humanity in childhood. 

She is leaning over Danny’s lap to see them, hands pressed lightly against Danny’s thighs, and she can feel hot breath against her neck. “I… um, my mom, she… uh… told me… something, but I…” she stutters, and she wonders if Danny has done this on purpose, pulling her close under the guise of distant things. 

But Danny merely shifts in her seat and moves Laura’s hand in a wide sweep, following the sloping course of some imaginary shape, “That,” Danny said, her voice aglow with enthusiasm, “Is called the Reaver; see how it resembles the tribal blades that the indigenous inhabitants of,” Danny utters a few guttural noises, which Laura assumes is the name of the planet, tilted more wildly on its axis than Laura’s home, visible out the window opposite, before grinning as though embarrassed. She shakes her head, “That was a pretty gross mispronunciation, I’ll admit, but in my defence human languages are generally pitched within the range of our hearing and aliens generally have better sonic faculties, so, yeah.”

She’s abashed, and self-conscious, and Laura is very close to her, so she can feel the hitch in Danny’s breath as Laura shifts her hand on her thigh to examine the constellation, “So I guess that violence isn’t just a human obsession, huh?”

“Well, those blades were used more as crafting tools, stripping thin slices of hardwoods without killing the trees themselves, carving intricate symbols to communicate with deities. They actually believed that communication was a gift, and worshipped a vast swathe of writing practices that they developed,” Danny raised her eyes from her lap and caught Laura smiling at her, and Laura could have sworn she saw a flicker of something powerful in those blue eyes. “I, uh, I think you’d find them really interesting.”

“Yeah?”

“Totally.”

And then things get a little intense, because Laura gets a bit distracted by the way Danny smiles at her, without pretence, and she forgets that she’s basically on top of her at this point, one palm pressed against the window, the other gripping Danny’s leg. It isn’t until a crowd of those trainee pilots thunders by in a chorus of wolf-whistles, laden with snacks but obviously unburdened by brain cells that she realises how they must look. 

Danny doesn’t miss a beat, “Go toss yourself in a black hole, see if spaghettification helps you a sense of humour.”

There’s a chorus of incoherent noises, evidently intended to suggest that some sort of challenge has been posed, and as Laura scrambles back into her seat she sees every muscle in Danny’s not inconsiderable frame tighten, and for a moment it looks as though something really idiotic is going to happen, because Laura doesn’t miss the subtle shift of athletic girls in the seats surrounding them as they position themselves to their tactical advantage. “Danny,” Laura starts to plead, but a moment later the louts are scrambling back to their seats. 

Danny seems thoroughly perplexed for a moment, before a voice cuts through the combined volume of a dozen conversations, and she pales just a little. Laura swivels, almost dislocating her shoulder in an attempt to see over the back of her seat, even as Danny tries to pull her back down, hissing a warning, and peeks over her seat to see a woman, obscured by students scrambling back to their allotted positions. 

She’s at least six feet tall, and Laura glimpses snatches of power-suited, finely muscled bulk as she prowls down the length of the cabin, scattering students with every resounding step. 

Laura drops back into her seat in time to see Perry chaperoning Lafontaine back to their seat, her face a mask of barely-disguised anxiety. Even Lafontaine; cool, fearless Lafontaine, looks a little panicked as they slide into their seat at Laura’s side. “What is happening?” Laura finally manages to say, “Who is that?”

Perry settles primly into her seat and replies in what she must have thought was a measured tone, “It’s the Dean. The Dean is coming.”

////

Lafontaine has never been fond of power dynamics, but as they coax Perry down from her self-imposed flurry of nervous sewing, they admit that they have a special dislike for the Dean. There’s something unnerving about how, if you pay attention, she doesn’t really breathe enough to sustain six feet of pacing back and forth along the aisle, speaking with effortless volume. LaFontaine is all for making judgements based on concrete evidence, but there’s something about the Dean that just makes their skin crawl, and their super-scientist senses are tingling off the charts. 

They run their hand up and down Perry’s arm, trying to keep a smile fixed on their face as they contemplate several plans to possibly steal a blood sample from the Dean. So far most of them have resulted in hypothetical beheadings and subsequent dismemberment, though strapping a flamethrower to a pulse rifle is something they hadn’t considered previously. 

Perry shoots them a look as though she can read their mind, “You’ll be pleased to know that they have pressurised fire extinguishers in each room,” she tells them, her smile an uncomfortable coupling of fondness and disapproval, “I called ahead to check.”

Of course she did. 

“Tell me they aren’t the size of those old odour-neutralising sprays because I can just see some dumb grav racer blowing off an arm because they’re late to practice and can’t be bothered to read the label,” Lafontaine says, and Perry’s eyes widen at the thought.

She waves a hand at them, “Don’t be absurd, it’s actually a small contraption that instantly fills the room with extinguishing fog, which doubles as a neutraliser for most corrosive or combustive acids,” she pauses, “and alkaline solutions, I suppose.”

“Sounds fabulous,” LaFontaine deadpans, already dreading the coming week; getting an organisation system that isn’t affected by the occasional tectonic shift is a delicate matter. They’re probably going to spend the next several months wrestling with the nightmarish effect that practically any extinguishing substance has on their hair (the intimate familiarity they have with this fact is something that should probably embarrass them). 

Goodness knows zero-gravity training is going to be interesting enough, but it’s a staple for anyone who wants to work aboard the super trawler vessels that venture out scanning planets and collecting rock samples. The blueprints of rocks on unexplored planets are big business on some planets, and it’s practically the only way they’re ever going to make the kind of discoveries that mean anything to a generally unimpressed universe.

But that dream means long weeks out in space, working intensively in labs and trying to bounce signals off distant satellites to communicate from the largely unexplored reaches of the universe; it means travelling so far that general relativity starts to mean something; it means brushing hulls with bits of broken planets and never holding someone’s hand. 

It means living without Perry.

Perry narrows her eyes at their distant expression, “I don’t want to find out that you’re thinking of ways to use my new safety regulations to your advantage.”  
They bite their lip, not exactly feigning guilt, because they feel it everywhere, and they love this girl. They have never loved anything like they love her, but the price of leaving a handprint on the galaxy is steep. Perry’s eyes are wide and trusting and a little bit furious as they say, expertly disguising the tremor in their tone, “Define advantage.”

///

The ship lurches out of FTL, materialising above the barren surface of Styria, and Danny feels her suddenly weightless body lurch against the safety belts holding her in place. The planet floating with apparent serenity below them is twice the size of Danny’s home, but lacking the dense vegetation that make it almost as conducive to human life as Earth. Danny know just how ruthless Styria can be, hundreds of miles of freezing wasteland riddled with caverns from the once bountiful rivers and lakes that have retreated underground, leaving a hollow skeleton in their wake, liable to bury those who venture into its bones. 

The Summer Society operates chiefly in the small area of terraformed land that surrounds Silas, as lush as several centuries of innovation can make it, but Danny has never been one to turn her back on a challenge. She shivers, recalling nights spend listening to the planet shudder, hunkered below ground to avoid the swathes of freezing wind ferocious enough to make body temperatures plummet in minutes. 

Due to some quirk of geology, it’s practically balmy beneath the surface, warm air puffing through winding, vaulted halls and narrow tunnels as though exhaled by a giant sleeping within the planet’s core, racing through the carcass of abandoned stone before sweeping with a whimper into the annihilating front of cold air just above ground.   
Yet the sight of this uninhabited side of the planet still arouses something akin to fondness in Danny’s lungs, because even though Styria is a strange and hostile place, it’s the only place in the universe she has ever found family. They might be ferocious and competitive and, quite frankly, responsible for far too many accidental severed limbs, but they’re everything she has. “There it is,” Laura breathes at her side, her limbs, suspended, squirming with excitement. 

Danny can’t help but smile, “We should land within the hour,” she advises as the ship begins to pump its engines, winding around to the dark side of the planet.   
“Is anything alive down there?” Laura murmurs, gesturing to the craggy, gnarled face Styria bares to its sun. 

Danny shrugs, “Possibly. No one has actually explored Styria properly, and the only inhabited zone is Silas.” She remembers waking half-delirious, feeling the planet’s hot breath on the back of her neck, and hearing distant voices in the tunnels, echoing from somewhere within the planet. She’d sat sleepless and motionless, as those faint whispers reached her ears, too low to make out words. “There are rumours of people seeing things while spelunking, which is strictly forbidden by the way, and a rite of passage.”

“Wait, really?” Laura looks absolutely terrified. 

“Yup,” LaFontaine says from over Laura's shoulder, grinning wickedly, “Apparently they let you dive into underground canyons and everything.” Over their shoulder, Perry blanches.  
Danny feels an unbidden twinge of fear in response, recalling Laura’s supreme clumsiness and general inability to retain any reasonable equilibrium for more than a few seconds. Maybe dragging her into the untold depths of Styria’s underbelly isn’t the most brilliant plan she’s ever devised, but Laura is already warming to the idea, exchanging excited looks with LaFontaine. Danny finds herself peering over their heads at Perry and understanding exactly what she finds there. 

When Danny first arrived at Silas, she’d thrown herself at every dangerous sport, every inadvisable activity she could find, practicing with working models of Lightsabers, letting vodka-ridden girls shoot imported fruit off of her head with blasters, and generally doing everything within her power to get hurt. But Laura makes her crave safety, soft blankets, everything she had tossed aside disdainfully. She knows that it’s really, truly stupid to care this much about someone after knowing them for less than twenty-four hours, but she can’t help reaching for Laura’s hand as the ship coasts into darkness, thrusters gunning intermittently.

Laura turns her head a little, flashing Danny the edge of a smile as she continues to discuss the pros and cons of magnetised boots for construction work, all the while running her thumb over Danny’s. 

(she’s never had faith in anything bigger than herself, but Laura makes her want to believe in divinity.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you want to listen to me moan about writing and get too excited about space you can follow me at daisychainsandbowties.tumblr.com


	4. Days Beyond the Rhododendrons

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: suicide mention (be safe pls)

This is the one star in their ﬁrmament  
Or frames a star within a star.  
What should they do there but desire?  
So many days beyond the rhododendrons  
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,  
.  
~ Derek Mahon, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford

///

The luggage hold is practically cavernous, stretching hundreds of metres from end to end, as big as the battlefield she trekked through, blood-shod and half-blind and fresh from decades of unheard screams. This is nothing, this is easy.

This is going back to that same place, that same space where so much of her long life has been whiled away in sloppy kisses and teasing heights everyone else thought fatal.   
Carmilla feels herself pacing, too fast, back and forth, weaving with chilling, feline grace through stacked duffel bags and footlockers, hands clenched by her sides. It’s huge, vast, bigger than bunkers and apartments and cabins, bigger than ships she spent years roaming with easy smiles and youthful grace. 

Living in space suits daubed in the paint they should’ve used to make the ship look brand new, she’d though herself ancient, learned, flinging around old languages, reciting texts long lost to humanity, teasing at secrets in alcohol-hazed conversations with pretty girls, toting nineteen and twenty-one years to her meagre eighteen, squeezed into the same worn hallways for years on end, enduring pointed enquiries about the secret to her youthful veneer. Try death, try being split from breastbone to groin for some mysterious fascination – she manufactured age out of oldness. 

But now the aching softness of her palms makes her want to escape into the silence of self-imposed airlock execution. Not that her death sentences have worked before. Because being old is not the same as aging, and she has never managed the grace she’s watched acquaintances saunter into, perfectly at ease with the idea of oblivion, throwing an atheism manifesto across a dining table at equally withered companions while Carmilla watched, hiding beneath an elegantly lopsided hat. They were so at ease, so unconcerned about impending doom.

Carmilla paces, because she’s still alive, because she can. Expletives meld into a multi-lingual torrent until the walls echo with her half-baked fury.

(who is she even angry with anymore?)

She should’ve brought a longer book, or a book she hadn’t pawed through many times before, meticulously cautious as pages wore away beneath her fingers in a way she’d never managed. But there is no philosophy that can make her feel closer to the time she should have lived in, the time she should have been allowed to die in. Nietzsche swinging back and forth between embracing life and embracing existence is oddly validating, human life as a brief, twinkling moment of existence while the universe stands staunch and virtually unmoving. It makes her feel a part of something, this cosmic mess. 

Because she is old but she is far, far younger than stars. 

Her boots leave black marks on the polished floor, sending rubbery squeaks booming against the walls, and it almost feels like a conversation. Her anger echoed back to her, dulled, without the uneasy weight of transient things shouting into the void. 

Over time, loving girls has become too hefty. When we say things to other people, we expect them to die and take our memories with them, dissolve into whatever stream of life or consciousness or nothingness drives life ever onwards, but Carmilla never has. Those words carry on, they paint themselves in recollections onto distant moons, and she can only carry so much unrequited affection with her.

(they are as sturdy as coffin nails)

////

Danny pulls Laura in her wake and they stumble into unfamiliar sunlight, laughter leaving itself inside the loading bay as Styria unfolds before them, in all its terraformed smugness. The campus is huge, boasting miles of dense forest, coniferous trees almost creepily reminiscent of those Laura has seen in books; a mimicry of pine trees.   
The school itself towers above them, a mass of charred chrome sitting like a vast, ungainly spider presiding over manicured lawns, and Danny gestures to it self-consciously, as though it needs pointing out, “That’s the intended focal point of activity around here, but, as you can see, it’s more or less incredibly creepy and unnerving so we kind of pretend it doesn’t exist.”

Laura swivels on the spot, tangling her feet almost immediately, gaping as she fights to stay upright, taking in the bizarre collection of old terraformers converted into loading bays and laboratories, some burned dull by the decades, others bedecked in streaks of paint spattered alongside the distinctive wear of hoverboard fields against metal. There are courier bots passing overhead, black specks hefting parcels and parts, tottering past streaks of mismatched anti-gravity bikes piloted by a collection of students bedecked in dizzyingly vivid specks of colour, some lolling in multi-tentacled ungainliness in synthetic leather-covered seats designed for humans, others packed into full body armour, practicing manoeuvres in a mess of shrill cries. 

Even accustomed to the bustle of a mini-metropolis, Laura can’t prevent the scope of her awe from asserting itself onto her features, an unabashed amazement that makes Danny tug on her hand affectionately. Around them, students pick over the walkway, peering down into the mess of mid-afternoon activity below them; grassy knolls populated by lolling canine-hybrids bred for exploration, their owners crushed, laughing, beneath their mammoth paws; hoverboards winding through the mess, pushing aside pedestrians; a writhing accumulation of the best and brightest and maddest in the universe, discussing the finest points of astrophysics and clone ethics and hoverboard retrofits in a blur of languages.

“This is…” Laura begins, attempting to pull Danny in her wake as she scrambles to peer over the sunburnt edge of the walkway. Danny pulls her back gently as the traditional six or seven students careen over the side and into the waiting arms of upperclassmen, nudged, howling, by friends and strangers into the throng.

“A dangerous and irresponsible collection of the most talented and reckless individuals from any species you might care to mention,” Danny finishes, glaring at a boy with a ridiculously colourful plume of spiked hair as he swaggers past them, holding up his hands in mock surrender. She attempts to smile at Laura but soon sizzles into a scowl as the same boisterous group of trainee-pilots begin hooting as they divest gravity of several more students, “Unfortunately, the racing programme here, while prestigious, is often not… selective enough about its participants.”

“Who are they?” Laura enquires tentatively, leaning around Danny’s athletic bulk to watch as airborne students squawk out of sight.

Danny looks suddenly self-conscious, clearing her throat deliberately, “Well, while the racing team here is technically a joint-effort, over the years something of a, um, schism has formed. It’s chiefly the fault of whatever lingering strain of male-entitlement made it off Earth having apparently decided to assert itself in the Zetas, an all-male imbeciles club set up, I suspect, in direct retaliation to the Summer Society. Since most of our members are somehow involved in the vehicular program at Silas…” Danny shrugs, “Things just got… heated, and it doesn’t help that the current leadership has taken us back a century in inter-club dialogue.” 

Laura had expected rivalry throughout campus, particularly one boasting the most diverse student-body ever gathered under one institute of higher learning, but this seems a little juvenile. As Danny’s face maintains a slightly furious shade of magenta, even when the Zetas, at long last, fling themselves bodily into the crowd, leaving the survivors of their onslaught to awkwardly shuffle along the walkway, Laura decides that her best course of action involves not sharing that thought with her very new, very angry friend. 

Instead, she pulls Danny out of her vendetta-induced trance with a squeeze of her hand, smiling as her companion jolts, looking down at her with momentarily undisguised gratitude. She rests her head against Danny’s arm, “You know, bloodied feud aside, I think I’m going to really love this place.”

Danny’s voice, when she replies, is terribly soft, “I think so too.”

///

Perry has never felt more like a chaperone than in this moment, as she keeps a dogged hold on LaFontaine’s hand, shooting apologies over her shoulder as they stumble from one “incredibly amazing” landmark to the next. Like a pinball, they ricochet across campus, each location sparking off a chain reaction of intensely curious exploration.

Perry has to put her foot down when they propose leaping into a suspiciously large hole in the otherwise pristinely manicured lawn that stretches down, untroubled by the rickety walkways and cavernous laboratories that dot the remainder of the campus, from the main building. 

LaFontaine has wasted no time in listing every property of the deep black metal that arches effortlessly into domes and arches and spiked towers unnervingly alike those Perry has seen in old pictures of cathedrals. It is resistant to practically any projectile, acid, or daub of pain you might care to throw at it, and in the event of another galactic war, it represents perhaps the safest place in the universe.

Silas is the most coveted institute of unbiased education in this, and probably any, system, and its central attraction seems like some sort of reminder, as just beyond its lengthy shadow youth tangle in a chorus of squeals and incomprehensible cackling, of what the anti-aircraft turrets dotted across campus were once intended to protect. 

The thought makes Perry shiver and tighten her grip on LaFontaine’s hand. The academy is now protected by a fascinating and convoluted series of alliances and pacts that ensure galaxy-wide conflict should a single vessel pass unchecked into Styria’s orbit. The Dean may be the single most unsettling individual Perry has ever had the misfortune of being stuffed into a conspicuously small space with, but she knows her intergalactic politics. And as a future member of the galactic council, Perry can respect that. 

(the thought of LaFontaine given free-reign to explore the intergalactic capital of trade, commerce, and probably crime makes Perry’s stomach squirm)

Watching them gaze with wide eyes at the apparently top-notch geometry of Silas’ intimidating centrepiece, Perry feels a fierce twinge of protectiveness. They might be an accomplished scientist, cleverer than most people by quite a long shot, but that doesn’t eliminate the fact that they periodically set themselves on fire. She remembers the first time she arrived to find LaFontaine self-conscious patting at a wreath of flames spreading through their hair and realised that they had never really been looked after before. 

Because even in the golden age of space-travel, the void has its perils, and someone must have forgotten to remind the pirates who had ejected LaFontaine’s family into space that they were supposed to have been hunted to extinction, rooted out by galactic patrols and bounty hunters. They’d taken all that LaFontaine had despite the decree of statistics, despite the length of odds against their resurgence on that day, in that small corner of a vast universe, and left them alone in a world that grew bigger with every moment. Even at ten years of age, they knew the math that made the galaxy expand with every passing millisecond, but no amount of equations scrawled onto decadent wallpaper could make time turn back on itself, could bring their mother’s gentle smile back to light up what little remained of childhood.

The first time Perry had given their cavernous, almost-empty apartment a determined scrub, she’d found a box full of shattered photo frames. In one picture, LaFontaine had been sporting a retro pirate hat, smiling from behind their mother’s handbag as sunlight drenched the terraformed paradise they’d spent their last holiday exploring. 

She didn’t understand the strange shrapnel of a broken heart until that day. 

(but she discovered that love and pain feel very alike)

///

Danny rested a hand casually far – embarrassingly far – above Laura’s head as they stood together in the doorway to her new room, a strangely normal-looking compartment in a towering complex of dormitories, linked by perilous stretches of rickety walkway, elevators clinging to frayed pulleys and short-range teleportation pads whose standard deviation could only conceivably cost its user a few hairs, a brain cell or five thousand, in quantum mechanical tax. LaFontaine had attempted to explain the theory of quantum teleportation before, with its deadly 50/50 likelihood of delivering its charge either fully intact, or bizarrely misshapen, rearranged in precisely the wrong way, but Laura had stopped listening after the words “possible dismemberment” had turned her mind down many gristly avenues. 

Mercifully, from what Laura can glimpse through the bathroom door, wedged ajar with a stack of –yup – priceless encyclopaedias, the shower seems to operate in a similar fashion to its compatriots back home. Silas is really strange, and really amazing, but Laura is painfully aware that she’s spent more than twenty-four hours in these clothes, during which time she has been suspended in a cabin with globules of vomit, and she really just wants to shower and not watch her life play tiresomely on repeat as she struggles across health-code-violating steel beams masquerading as pathways.

Danny chuckles as Laura lets out a long, exhausted sigh, “I’m guessing you’d like a few hours to get ready before the opening ceremony?” 

Laura swivels so quickly she almost takes her own eye out with her flailing hands, “Opening ceremony?!”

There is definitely something wicked in Danny’s smile as she regards her diminutive travel companion with guarded amusement, “I think you’ve got,” she pretends to consult an absent wristwatch, “four hours.”

Laura turns once again to confirm that her room is, indeed, in a state of utter disarray, and wherever the courier bots saw fit to dump her belongings, it certainly wasn’t in the vicinity of her assigned space. “I’m doomed,” she concludes glumly. 

“Doomed and beautiful; Shakespeare would approve,” Danny’s tone is full of jest, but as Laura turns, one eyebrow coked in enquiry, her face quickly turns bright, beetroot red.   
She smiles with a wicked edge to match Danny’s previous smugness, “Beautiful, eh?”

Danny’s arm slips down the doorframe as she struggles to compose herself. Abandoning the attempt, she affects an air of unconvincing superiority, “Good luck finding your clothes, frosh,” she says, and with a swish of her hair, she departs. 

Leaving Laura torn between giggling and bursting into tears because someone has honestly used priceless books as a doorjamb and her clothes are missing and her dad would absolutely hate this place.

Which, okay, is an interesting thought. Because Danny has just left her in the middle of a strange school fraught with danger and safety hazards, and she obviously thinks that Laura can handle it. 

(and, yeah, maybe she can)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me moaning about writing = daisychainsandbowties.tumblr.com
> 
> (also you should 300% read the full text of Derek Mahon's poem - "A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford" - my little snippet did not do it justice)


	5. They Imagined us Shining

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which I became LaFerry af

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known” ~ Carl Sagan

Carmilla has envisioned hell plenty of times, daubing it in classical scorched hues as she lounged over the highest balconies of Notre Dame, or letting Robert Frost nudge her towards icy wastelands and cold breath. Underneath the steely resolve of a coffin lid hell had been bloody rivers and constantly drowning. She’d glimpsed hell in watching her friends rupture in the dark of space, their bulging eyes perplexed in the moments before pressure popped them in sickening silence.

In other words; there’s a hell for every occasion. 

She tries to persuade herself, teetering carelessly on the absolute edge of a walkway jutting at a dizzying height over this strange repetition of Mother’s earthly kingdom, that the first day of term, even in all its bright-eyed enthusiasm, doesn’t really rate in the premium of hellish circumstances she has been privy to. Like that time, she recalls with a smirk, she stumbled out of a quantum teleportation sequence with her right arm having switched places with her right leg. 

The evening that followed isn’t one she cares to recall. Strange, the sort of wry perspective an excess of a thousand years can grant you. She comforts herself with agony, finds peace in the knowledge that she has faced worse, even if survival is the only accolade she can lay claim to anymore. Below her, students teeter in drones across walkways, some clenching their teeth as they trace hesitant paths, others rushing with distracted abandon over the chasm of hazardous activity extending beneath them. Carmilla watches them, struggling to revive that sense of finite existence that keeps them for noticing her dark eyes looming above them, predatory even in the passive lull that has seized her in these past several days.

She’s signed up for several classes, eschewing her habitual scathing domination of every linguistics lecture in favour of a more tactile timetable. As a child she loved to paint, loved the great scabs of colour that blossomed along her arms, loved the absolute wastefulness that characterised her occasional dalliance with art, splashing expensive paint onto expensive walls and sneaking down at night to scrub them clean to spare the servants the bloody knees and aching shoulders she’d come away with at dawn. She could only come close to that vivid fascination, a thousand years flung forward, in the belly of retrofitted frigates and one-lifeform fighters, dabbling in oil and electricity and atomised thrusters. So, despite Mother’s obvious distaste, she’d signed up to study under several of the most accomplished interplanetary vehicular engineers currently breathing. 

That, and philosophy. 

Despite her interest in the subject, Carmilla has done little more than scrounge space-worthy motors from the natural habitats of planets she’d crash landed on since her initial contribution to the baseline technology that fuelled the intergalactic community. She was, as the career-gamers she’d banded with in the later era of the total-immersion virtual reality revolution used to say, out of the mainframe when it came to modern technology. 

And yes, ‘modern’ is a word she is most assuredly tired of having to use. 

It was a peculiar feeling, ignorance. It reminded her of the hours before that first launch into space. It reminded her of walking on mars. 

It reminded her of being alive. 

…

Every last inch of every last unruly curl spiralling from every square centimetre of Perry’s head is in order, through a series of polite discussions, shouting matches and unsportsmanlike throttling that ought to be recorded in the annals of diplomatic relations. The dorm room contains not a single particle of dust whose presence Perry has not personally sanctioned. The beds are made, the suspicious, chemical-scented stains on the wall have been treated with sodium bicarbonate and a firm hand, the test tubes are arranged in alphabetical order according to their (often dubious) contents. 

To the highest degree of Perry’s not inconsiderable experience; everything is shipshape. Except, naturally, for one key ingredient, one rusted cog in an otherwise well-oiled machine. Perry sits poised in indecision on the absolute edge of her recently rumpled bedspread, one hand already agitating the recently tamed recesses of her hair, lips pressed into the bloodless line of mixed fury and fear. 

LaFontaine is missing. 

Perhaps, had they been home, she might assume that they’d simply stumbled out in pursuit of lactose drenched avocado-substitute pizza, but here, on an unfamiliar planet, most of which isn’t technically supportive of human existence, LaFontaine has no such excuse for disappearing in the practically infinitesimal space between Perry’s brief reconnaissance of the laundry room and her return. 

(the laundry room is infested with rock wyverns, but that will have to wait)

…

“I am so angry at you,” she mumbled against their smiling lips.

“Um, not to poke holes in your logic, but anger does not traditionally manifest in, well, making out.”

“You’ll just have to suspend your disbelief then.” Lafontaine is doused head to toe in a choking mixture of rocket fuel and soot, pressed against the slimy wall of a very disused munitions shed on the literal edge of terraformed Silas, and, somehow, despite that, Perry is kissing them like they’ve recently been resurrected. She bites their lip, almost speculatively; almost as though she’s so lost in the kiss she can’t tell the difference between them anymore. 

The thought makes Lafontaine’s heart perform several cacophonic jumps and they force their head back against the wall, as far from Perry’s as they can manage. About two inches, and Perry’s breath tastes of vanilla and icing sugar and they’re definitely dizzy. When did they stop kissing? Why on ancient Earth did they stop kissing?

“I’m sorry, Lafontaine, I suppose I must have overreacted… slightly,” Perry peeks at the utter destruction wrought by one, cosmologically insignificant wrench, and manages to bit her own lip this time. “For a while I had kind of convinced myself you’d been kidnapped by - oh I don’t know! – space pirates or something, which is really very imaginative of me.”

Lafontaine grins, “Count me impressed.”

“It isn’t funny Lafontaine!” Their smile falters, and Perry wrings her hands apologetically, removing them from where they’d been literally pinning Lafontaine against the wall. “I’m sorry, it’s not your fault!” her voice is shrill, “It’s mine, absolutely mine.” Lafontaine can see her trying to modulate her tone, “I should’ve knocked, or not freaked out because we’re adults and you’re perfectly capable of…”

“Of blowing myself up all on my own?” Perry’s bottom lip wobbles and Lafontaine’s fingers leave soot stains when they cup her chin gently, looking evenly into Perry’s inexplicably frightened eyes, “There isn’t a live fuse for at least a square mile, and I smell like early spacefaring but I’m unharmed and nothing more than amused.”

Perry shakes her head, jostling curls whose disarray mirrors her upset, “Well, I’m furious at myself. All that talk of fire regulations and I just saunter into an old building screaming like a banshee.” Lafontaine wants to disagree, but Perry did sound remarkably like some wailing, disillusioned maiden from the 12th Century. But, you know, she’s their wailing disillusioned maiden – any day. 

“I’d hug you, but you’ve already managed to smear enough rocket fuel on your blouse and I desperately require a shower.”

“Rain check?”

“Shower check, Per, and then we can scrounge up some food that’s been biologically engineered to taste delicious whilst simultaneously nourishing the human body to the grudging respect of doctors everywhere. I don’t know about you but it’s been quite a while since I’ve watched a gloriously optimistic, yet scarily accurate space opera from the 1970s.” Perry’s idea of a perfect evening probably involves more elbow grease and pastry, but she smiles a sloppy, tired smile and leans into them to snatch one last kiss.

(only it’s not the last. the last is tomorrow’s problem)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Find me at daisychainsandbowties.tumblr.com


End file.
